Changes between Initial Version and Version 1 of Roja

Timestamp:

Jun 28, 2012, 6:44:50 PM (12 years ago)

Author:

Trupti

Comment:

--

Roja

@@ +1 @@
+'''Roja'''
+
+
+1992 137’(114’) col/scope Tamil
+d/sc Mani Rathnam pc Kavithalaya Prod.
+p K. Balachander st/dial Sujata
+lyr Vairamuthu c Santosh Sivan
+m A.R. Rehman
+lp Aravind Swamy, Madhubala, Pankaj Kapoor,
+Janakaraj, Nasser
+
+
+Unusually, Mani Rathnam’s Tamil hit also
+became a success in its Hindi dubbed version.
+A politically controversial film set mainly in
+Kashmir, it recalls the real-life incident of a
+Kashmiri terrorist kidnapping of an Indian Oil
+official in 1993. In a spectacular opening the
+Indian army captures the dreaded Kashmiri
+terrorist Wasim Khan. In return, militants
+abduct the film’s hero, the Tamilian cryptologist
+Rishi Kumar (Swamy). Roja (Madhubala) is
+Rishi Kumar’s Tamil-speaking wife, left alone
+and unable to communicate in a land where
+nobody speaks her language. Eventually, just
+as she manages to convince a minister to agree
+to an exchange of prisoners, Rishi Kumar is
+released while the terrorist leader Liaqat
+(Kapoor) is ‘humanised’. The lead couple’s
+marriage in the sylvan surroundings of the
+cryptologist’s native Tamilian village, evokes
+the rhetoric of Tamil nationalism, a contentious
+issue in the context of Rajiv Gandhi’s
+assassination by Sri Lankan Tamils and the
+DMK’s avowed past seperatism. Rathnam then
+displaces this nationalism by inflating it to the
+dimensions of Indian and, more specifically,
+uncritically Hindu chauvinism contrasted with
+the presentation of the Kashmiris as religion
+obsessed, bellicose and profoundly
+‘unreasonable’. In one famous scene, the tiedup
+hero, offended by the Kashmiris’ burning of
+the Indian flag, crashes through a window and
+tries to extinguish the flames with his body to
+the tune of a Subramanya Bharati lyric. In
+Hyderabad, the film’s Telugu version sparked
+an outbreak of anti-Muslim slogans. Billed as a
+‘patriotic love story’, India’s election
+commissioner T.N. Seshan took the most
+unusual step of officially endorsing the film.
+The music was also a hit, esp. the rap number
+Rukmini sung in Hindi version by Baba Sehgal.
+Tejaswini Niranjana analysed the film’s political
+address in her essay Integrating Whose Nation?
+(1994), which led to a major debate on the film
+in the Economic & Political Weekly.
+
+[[Film]]